Digital lighting technologies, i.e. illumination based on semiconductor light sources, such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), offer a viable alternative to traditional fluorescent, HID, and incandescent lamps. Functional advantages and benefits of LEDs include high energy conversion and optical efficiency, durability, lower operating costs, and many others. Recent advances in LED technology have provided efficient and robust full-spectrum lighting sources that enable a variety of lighting effects in many applications. Some of the fixtures embodying these sources feature a lighting module, including one or more LEDs capable of producing different hues, e.g. red, green, and blue, as well as a processor for independently controlling the output of the LEDs in order to generate a variety of colors and color-changing lighting effects.
LED lighting fixtures increasingly are being networked together, e.g., using communication technologies such as ZigBee, coded light, WiFi and so forth. In many cases, they may be paired with presence or light-level sensors to be used for applications such as data collection and lighting control. Some presence and light-level sensors are capable of network communication, e.g., using KNX (EN 50090, ISO/IEC 14543) or a data addressing lighting interface (DALI, IEC 60929). However, the benefits gained from many of these applications may not justify the investment required for networked lighting. For instance, a shop owner might wish to know how many people passed a particular area of her shop or picked up a particular product from shelves. While this information may be useful, it may not be useful enough or valuable enough to motivate the shop owner to perform a complete store refurbishment. Accordingly, a more inexpensive solution is desirable.
Moreover, if a networked presence sensor were coupled with every LED light fixture in a busy store, the amount of information produced from sensing a large number of shoppers might be overwhelming, and would make data collection and mining complex. Accordingly, a simpler, more decentralized solution is desirable.
Thus, there is a need in the art to provide methods, systems, computer-readable media and apparatus that enable control of presence sensing and/or one or more properties of light output, and that optionally overcome one or more drawbacks of existing apparatus and/or methods.